I never used to like books, wasn’t the sort of thing we did as young men growing up in England. Not in the 80’s anyway, you know the scene…..uh food, water, me like you….hu hu. I was a cave man , no doubt about it.

I only really started reading books seriously about 15 years ago. I now feel a bit empty/ board if i’m not reading a book of some kind. I know books are getting a bit of a reputation in some quarters as being old-fashioned with the new Kindle and other well-known book readers, but let’s be honest its not the same is it?

You cant fold the corners of a page over, all of them look the same, no doubt you can change the colour of the case to suit your mood…..yippee. You can now download books from itunes. I wonder how long it will be before the kindle is classed as old-fashioned?

Book shops have had to diversify over the years to get people to come in, stay in and buy things. You’ll struggle to walk in to a book shop now without seeing a coffee shop and cakes. It took a a bit of getting used to when this first started becoming common place, but now i’m looking for a quiet book shop where i can get a coffee and take half an hour out of my work day to zone out. If i’m sat looking at a computer all day at work, the last thing i want to do when i get home is stare at a small electronic device to read the latest chapter of Harry Potter.

Keep supporting the small local bookshops , they wont be around for ever, but in this age of five-minute wonders and the next new fad lasting 2 or 3 weeks before we move on to the next thing or 24 hour news channels we have to put up with ( seeming 25 hours a day) book shops are a quiet corner of the world where you can forget your troubles and chill out even for a short while. It’s nice to be able to do that……….if you think about it , we don’t usually go to long without having a mobile phone with us, logging on to the internet on your phone is common place now. There was a time, not to long ago , when you went out of the house you were out of touch until you came home.

So the moral of this story? take your lunch break , don’t take your phone, get a book and sit in a coffee / book shop and take a load off…………whats the worst that could happen?

According to the media over the last couple of weeks, Apple was, is and always will be one of the greatest company s ever invented. I know that sentiment was high following Steve Jobs untimely death, but never the less you’d struggle to argue with their contribution over the last 25 years. Massive profits, recognisable logo, that phone and the itunes web site, surely one of the most visited and used web site there is in the world.

It appears now that there is a bit of a downer at the recent publication of $18 billion in revenues for the 3rd quarter of this year. Apple seem happy enough with Tim Cook CEO noting “We are thrilled with the very strong finish of an outstanding fiscal 2011, growing annual revenue to $108bn and growing earnings to $26bn. Customer response to iPhone 4S has been fantastic, we have strong momentum going into the holiday season, and we remain really enthusiastic about our product pipeline.”(skynews.com)

following this announcement sales dropped by 5%……….i dont get it? I wish my company was turning over 10% of the revenue of Apple. I have spoken about this before but why all the doom and gloom all the time? Why not champion this announcement as a good thing and try to generate some momentum with in the industry? Why not be happy with these profits? Apple appear to be happy, but because the predictions forecast $20 billion , they are $2 Billion short……..I’d like to be a penny behind them.

It used to be simple , you got a big fat desk top computer from your local Comet or Currys (or Tandys if your old enough), you could not alway pick one up on the day you bought it as they weren’t always in stock. You get eventually get it home , you don’t know how to work it or which cable goes in to where. It’s odd that you think it goes in one port and the wife thinks the other port, you can both be right but the fight that ensues would be worthy of a gladiators arena.

You finally get it working and it takes 10 minutes to load up, a further 10 to warm up and that is just so you can play solitaire as you need to wait for the 5-year-old from next door to pop in and show you how to plug the internet connection in……smug little git that he is.

But now…….now there are “tablets”, not paracetamol or aspirin , but it’s quite possible that you’ll need one of each by the time you’ve made your mind up. The comparison table on the Reuters website today shows that there really is too much to think about when it comes to computers.

I just want one that works to be honest, that used to be enough but now i need to look good or be able to say that mine has Bluetooth or i can get a signal on top of Kilimanjaro ( i probably can anyway now as there is a cafe on there i believe)

Well, the bail out that has caused a bit of a furore has been passed by the politicians. Despite the near demise of the german political system over the proposals and party’s all falling out with each other over it, the proposals were voted for. It is still believed that even with the 440 Billion Euro loan fund Greece will still default on its debt and plug the Euro then the world in to another prolonged financial crisis.

If we keep throwing money at the problem then where do we stop? What if Italy or Spain come with cap in hand for money then Portugal, what then? Can we afford to keep bailing out each country as we go along? Surely the money has got to run out at some point.

If you were running your own business and over a period of 6 or 8 months you had to get a loan to cover your losses 2 or 3 times do you think the bank manager would sign the money over? I know that is how we got in to this mess in the first place, but in practice it wouldn’t happen. Surely there is something wrong with the Greek financial set up and the country measures of austerity have not been enough and will not be enough going forward even with another loan? If Greece can not make the cuts necessary to pay back some of the debt now then how will it ever pay back the next lot of loans that inevitably are going to come?

I don’t want to see Greece fail or any other country or even the Euro to be honest as it’s not the nicest thing to happen and this is no time for me to be saying i told you so, as i honestly didn’t think it was a good idea at the time. I’m also pleased that Gt Britain did not go in to the Euro currency.

I don’t know what the answer is either but there are cleverer people out there who would agree with me that throwing more money at the problem is not the answer either.

I was one of the biggest Michael Jackson fans before the wheels came off the wagon so to speak. its such as shame now after the last 15 years of allegations, scandal and rumor, that even after his death the circus of his life carry’s on with the televised trail of his doctor starting today in the US.

Michael Jackson’s life over the last 15 years has played out in the media for all the wrong reasons. Once he died i honestly thought that he would fade from memory and be remembered for his music and contribution to entertainment over his life. I hate to say that once this trail is over and all of the dirty laundry has been aired in public they’ll be a book written about the trail, probably one from each Juror, the judge may chip in with an appearance on Letterman, followed by the doctor, who guilty or not will probably get some financial reward from the trail.

I don’t know if this says more about society as a whole or less about what we decide is news these days……..

So , there is a Jedi Council for entrepeneurs. I though there was but never been sure. As i understand it its similar to the Rotary Club except they have light sabers and Yoda is the Chairman, where as the Jedi Council have a goat, boom boom.

I think this is a good idea, and i dont know why i didn’t think of it earlier. I wonder when you become a full entrepeneur? Do you need to have one really good idea, or can you have 3 or 4 decent ideas adding up to make you a full entrepeneur?

I suppose Donald Trump will be trying to get on the board of directors of the council, he’ll probably have Yoda on his Yacht as we speak in St Bart’s , just for the weekend in order to put the rubber stamp on his appointment to the council, maybe getting some light sabre lessons whilst his there to help with the initiation ceremony, all above-board of course.

You can say what you like about the british economy, but it wont improve unless the Government injects some money in to it. we’ve now had a long enough period of austerity measures , cuts, job losses and FTSE100 drops to realise that it’s not working, or at least it may have worked to start with but it’s not working any more.

i think the cuts were necessary and it was something that the Government had to do, but we now need some optimism and injection of Government spending to try to stimulate the economy and kickstart a cycle of upward growth. If you look at the proposals that President Obama has made over the last two weeks it is designed to inject money in to the economy, in turn stimulating growth , confidence and eventually support its self in to sustaining growth and jobs over a longer period. It may not work, but at least he is trying something. In the UK its been a monetary policy of reducing interest rates which are now at rock bottom and can no longer be of any use in terms of cutting them.

Inject some money in to the economy, housebuilding and infrastructure , create some jobs get people back to work and get them spending some money. If it doesn’t work at least we’ve had a go as the outlook is bleak at the moment. It’ll only get worse if the euro zone crashes.

It might be just my memory playing tricks on me, but when i was younger bookshops were a bit stuffy, full of old people who looked over their glasses at you and smelled like the inside of my dogs kennel. Now they are one of my favorite places.

It’s nice to walk in off the street of a city and notice the quiet immediately when you enter a Waterstones or a Borders. The book shelves are all nicely set out, the books are nice to look at and all displayed in order to entice you in and make you want to buy one, or 3 for 2 as is the offer these days.

Theres usually a coffee shop in them now where you can go and peruse a book you may buy or look at the one you’ve already bought. they are quiet and a great place to eat your lunch when you’ve only got a quick half hour slot before you go back to the office. You can normally get help off the assistants who are usually younger than you and they are happy to help as well as give advice on what to get , whats hot and what is coming out over the next few weeks.

It’s nice to think that in the days of internet blogging, wireless communication and tweets that the modern bookshop is a haven from the day-to-day grind of everyday life. I love technology as much as any one but i don’t think the Kindle will replace the feel of a good book in your hand, do you?